Monday, May 10, 2010

“Upcoming cultural gala in China - Xinhua News Agency” plus 3 more

“Upcoming cultural gala in China - Xinhua News Agency” plus 3 more

Upcoming cultural gala in China - Xinhua News Agency

Posted: 10 May 2010 07:02 PM PDT

BEIJING, May 11 -- Now it's time to check up what's coming up on the cultural stages around the country.

Drama "Peer Gynt"

May13 & 14

National Center for the Performing Arts, Beijing

Drama "Peer Gynt", adapted from the original work by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, will be performed May the 13th and 14th at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Top-level art festival opens amid effort to boost ... - People's Daily Online

Posted: 10 May 2010 05:57 PM PDT

China opened its largest national art festival, an influential platform for Chinese performers to showcase their latest creations, in southern Guangdong Province Monday.


Beijing Opera artists Yu Kuizhi (L, center), Li Shengsu (C, center) and Meng Guanglu (R, center) perform during the opening ceremony of the 9th China Art Festival in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, May 10, 2010. The 9th China Art Festival kicked off in Guangzhou Monday. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin)

The ninth China Art Festival, held in the provincial capital, was co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture and the Guangdong Provincial government.

Li Changchun, a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said in a congratulatory letter that the festival would be "an art pageant of the people" and should contribute to the prosperity of socialist cultural development.

Li said that the festival, which was initiated in 1987, had become an important platform for artists to showcase their talent and had played an active role in promoting Chinese cultural and art development.

He hoped that it would attract more public participation and promote the creation of more outstanding cultural and art works.

State Councilor Liu Yandong announced the opening of the festival.

The art festival will feature 65 dramas from across the country that will compete for the "Wenhua" prize, the highest performance art award in China, a spokesman of the festival's organizing committee said.

More than 150 outdoor shows and exhibitions would also be held in urban squares and villages for the public, the spokesman said.

A trade fair of performance art, which organizers hope will become a regular feature, will be held during the two-week event. The last China Art Festival was held in 2007 in central China's Wuhan city.

Prof. Zhou Xiaozheng of Beijing-based Renmin University of China said performances showcased in the festival covered drama, opera, musicals and acrobatics, among others, which also include those listed as the country' s cultural heritage.

According to the organizer, the lowest price of the performance tickets is 20 yuan (2.94 U.S. dollars), and the number of low-price seats must be no less than 15 percent.

The festival opens as China steps up efforts to boost the reform of the cultural sector and transform most state-owned art troupes to market-oriented ones.

Statistics show 123 state-owned art troupes have been transferred to enterprises, which has boosted creativity and market awareness.

Wang Liesheng, a research fellow with the China Art Academy affiliated to the Ministry of Culture, told Xinhua that reform of the cultural sector will deepen during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).

Minister of Culture Cai Wu said last week that by 2012 all state-owned art troupes should complete the market-based reform."To develop and invigorate the nation, China not only needs economic power, but cultural power as well," he said.

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Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Chicago Cultural Center - A.V. Club

Posted: 10 May 2010 04:46 PM PDT

The Cultural Preconditions of American Liberty - Article.nationalreview.com

Posted: 10 May 2010 04:24 PM PDT

The oft-noted fault line of the conservative movement lies between economic conservatives and libertarians, on one hand, and social or cultural conservatives, on the other. The usual requirement for broad conservative electoral success is a "fusion" of these two wings. The most principled ground for that fusion — something other than the simple desire to win elections — lies in the recognition that, if liberty is the prime leitmotif of American conservatism, there are cultural preconditions necessary to make that liberty (political, economic, and cultural) possible and fruitful.

This topic is not a new one. Any discussion of it is likely to end up being a long line of footnotes to certain classics of political science, for example, Aristotle's Politics, the Federalist, and Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

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In Federalist No. 2, John Jay points out some of the more obvious elements of the common culture shared by Americans. This common culture based on ancestry, language, religion, political principles, mores (manners and customs), and shared history facilitated the trust — the "civic friendship" — that makes political community possible. (The absence of such a common culture is an obvious reason for the impossibility of any legal or political "world order" today.) Of course, there were certain tensions, too — slavery, agrarian vs. commercial interests, coastal vs. interior regions — which the Founders had to manage by various compromises (some more successful than others).

What are some of the cultural factors that have provided a foundation for American constitutionalism? Let me focus on a few of them: confidence in reason, the capacity for joint deliberation and action, a spirit of independence and self-reliance, sexual morality supporting the family, moderation of the taste for physical well-being, and a certain kind of religion.

Faith in man's capacity to know truth. Some people think that the best ground for protecting liberty is a fundamental skepticism about whether it is possible to know ultimate truths. Such skepticism, they think, undermines ideology and diminishes the likelihood that people will feel so sure of their beliefs that they will try to impose them on others. (Think of Justice Holmes's comment in Abrams v. U.S. (1919): "But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.")

The problem with this approach is that it is difficult to prevent such broad skepticism from being applied to the principles of freedom themselves. The American Founders had a deep faith in human reason. They understood the need to have a solid foundation for republican government in principles confidently held to be true — such as the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence — in order to avoid placing society on the shifting and unstable grounds of relativism or skepticism.

Tocqueville argued that without common beliefs — "dogma" or opinions entertained on trust and without discussion — no society can prosper. And he added that virtually all human actions "originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures." Doubt about these "first principles" leaves men confused and tempted to think no more about them, and "such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude" (as existentialist literature of the 20th century exemplified — imagine the kind of democratic citizen the protagonist of Camus's Stranger would be).

An important corollary of the belief that men can know truth is confidence that it is really possible to interpret documents, such as the Constitution. Contrary to contemporary hermeneutical theories, the Founders thought that it was possible to interpret a written document without the interpreter's reading his views into it (though that was a constant danger to be resisted). Without this confidence, the very act of writing a constitution would be an act of blind faith.

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